Daniel Burka:

At this point the vast majority of people are using browsers that support the transparent PNG [Ed's note, he's referring to PNG-24]. Huzzah! The critical mass has been reached and I believe it's finally over the top for the PNG.

"Critical mass" being at best 54%? I understand the whole mentality of "If I'm using a Web 2.0 application, I'm probably luring the early adopters with the latest browser" mentality, but it really saddens me when web developers take the mentality of "adopt the latest and greatest and screw everybody else." Every day, new applications purposely only work on as limited of an audience as possible. There was a recent thread on Ajaxian about Digg's new comment system and I responded (I would copy the quote here, but it requires context).

The basic gist of what I'm arguing (and I had to explain this to some Russian devs at MT) is that all UI views need to correspond to URLs. Period. The simplicity of  the web is built upon the powerful notion that you can refer to anything as a URI. Statelessness is a powerful idea.

The saddest thing about all these new sites is their insistence that the REST model is broken, and that fancy animations is more important than maintaining REST principles. It only requires a little more work, but you can get both for free!

This is partially why I'm so skeptical about the emergence of AIR and Silverlight and why I've hated Flash for so long - for content, it breaks the very ideas that made the web so popular. I don't dispute the value of rich clients at all (Pownce looks very nice from the screenshots cause I can't get no invite!)- but as web developers, isn't our goal to make our stuff work for as many people as possible? The web made content accessible - we should continue in that regards as accessibility engineers by creating web apps that work across as many platforms as possible (and degrades nicely).

I recently threw up some links in the old Tabulas control panel that lets people try out the super-buggy super-broken super-risky control panel. Most of the issues, so far, as related to people using outdated browsers. I'm pretty sure at least 3 out of the 10 or so bug reports I've gotten are from people using IE6 or older browsers. Which makes me remember that I need to abide by my own rules - oftentimes when I'm rushed for time, I'll just "make it work for Firefox.." but that's not acceptable!